“... The tragedy is not so much that Cherish died as that she had to die in hospital. And from Louisa May Alcott, Mackay has made the courageous choice of Beth’s last days. If we let ourselves read Alcott and Collins in the spirit in which they were written, we get to the very heart of loss. Happiness is rare in these stories. Elizabeth Jolley’s ‘Five Acre ...”

“... domestic happiness, another story altogether. How it will eventually be reconciled with this one may be a problem calling, in future years, for more ...”

“... The painting A Man with a Quilted Sleeve in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May) makes sense as a self-portrait. The bearded young man looks over his shoulder towards you as an artist would who had turned from canvas to mirror. There are also two undoubted self-portraits here. The Berlin picture (from the mid to late 1540s) shows Titian in vigorous old age – although exactly how old he was is a mystery since his date of birth is uncertain ...”

“... could be – it is in the rather vague way music is sometimes said to be. The feelings they rouse may seem too deep for words. I cannot get rid of the feeling that they could easily be too ...”

“... The tenth and last room of the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern (until 2 May) contains Economic Values, a piece from 1980. It consists of metal shelving stacked with household goods in bottles, packets and bags, all bought in what was then the GDR. They have, as Beuys intended, begun to disintegrate. The walls of the room are, as he requested, hung with ‘19th-century paintings in gold frames from the host museum ...”

“... on the Christian base of the Republican Party, which is composed of fundamentalists who, come what may, will continue to support the extreme right in Israel. So what is to be done? It looks increasingly likely that the answer is: nothing. On 19 February Condoleezza Rice convened a summit in Jerusalem between Olmert and Abbas, strictly for appearance’s ...”

“... Although it is normal for scientific papers to end with words like ‘suggest’, and ‘may indicate’, and ‘support the hypothesis’ (words denoting that closure is far off), it is unusual to start a paper with ‘draft’, when it has more than a hundred pages of online supporting material, because it tempts referees and editors to return the ...”

“... letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely. This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of ...”

“... even threatening to displace them. In Britain introductions as ancient as the sycamore (it may have come in with the Romans) have a weed-like propensity to seed themselves and take the place of trees with longer, better histories. In temperate lands, colonised in the 18th and 19th centuries, dramatic interactions between native and exotic floras were ...”

“... working life he saw the reputation and value of the modern art he admired rise. At the very end he may have sensed that an art world which took account of his kind of concentrated attention was giving way to one which was more interested in quick shocks and managed celebrity. Almost the last contact I had with him was after I’d written something to the ...”

“... where people can discuss the difficulties human beings have in getting things right. MetaTalk may be the talking cure of ...”

“... cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps? He wasn’t getting that. It may be that the interesting moment in such stories is always when the dwarves appear with the mallets, not when they get down to work. And here, in Eastern Promises, a remarkably gripping and disturbing film loses us (loses me anyway) at precisely the moment the ...”

“... that Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) can be distressed at the right time in his career. Or the effect may be amazing: all kinds of things happen in our minds if we learn that Napoleon is among the crowd at the guillotining of Marie Antoinette in 1793. As a matter of fact he was in Toulon at the time, putting an end to a royalist revolt backed by England and Spain ...”

“... wall. There is something Magrittean about the emptiness and puzzlement of the small scene. There may be a clue to its meaning in the strange perspective of the window bars, their connecting joints angled outwards to suggest a point of view closer to the window than the point from which it has been painted, as though the viewer were a single eyeball, drifting ...”

“... only compounds the offence. A guest editorial by Schlink in Der Spiegel in September 2007 may give a clue as to what is at stake in Homecoming. The German defence minister Franz Josef Jung had stated that shooting down hijacked planes might be allowed under constitutional law: ‘in situations of general danger or when Germany’s fundamental liberal ...”